Here's another item from our news desk:
Dueling Indictments As Russia, Ukraine Target Each Other's Military Leaders
Russia and Ukraine traded salvos this week with dueling criminal investigations against each other's top military brass, a new front in the ongoing conflict between the two countries.
Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko launched the opening legal hand grenade on August 22, announcing a probe into Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and 19 other Russian military and civilian officials.
Lutsenko said the officials are suspected of "committing especially serious crimes against the foundations of Ukraine's national and civil security, peace, and international law and order," adding that Kyiv plans to seek international warrants for their arrests.
Not be outdone, Russia's Investigative Committee returned fire on August 24, saying that a criminal investigation had been opened into Shoigu's Ukrainian counterpart, Stepan Poltorak, and other military officials.
They are accused of war crimes and violations of a 2015 cease-fire in the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas, according to a statement from the agency, Russia's top investigative body.
Fighting in parts of the Donbas has surged in recent weeks, with Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists exchanging mortar, artillery, and gunfire. Tensions there spiked earlier this month after Moscow said it had detained a group of Ukrainian saboteurs in Crimea, and large columns of military equipment were seen moving around the Ukrainian peninsula, which Russia seized and annexed in 2014.
Kyiv rejects Russian accusations of "provocations" in Crimea and war-torn eastern Ukraine.
The likelihood of either country putting the accused top officials on trial is virtually nil, though both nations allow for trials in absentia.
A lawmaker in Russia's upper house of parliament, meanwhile, suggested one way to further tweak Kyiv: by staging criminal proceedings against Ukrainian officials in areas of the Donbas territory controlled by separatist forces.
More than 9,500 people have been killed in the fighting, according to international observers, and tens of thousands have been displaced.
Here's a video report on Ukrainian Independence Day celebrations from RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service:
Ukraine Makes Show Of Force To Mark 25 Years Of Independence
Amid rising tensions with Russia, Ukraine marked 25 years of independence with a massive military parade in Kyiv.
Russia's confinement of a Tatar activist to a psychiatric clinic in Crimea is raising fears that Moscow is reviving a Soviet-era practice to intimidate opponents of the peninsula's annexation into silence. RFE/RL's Charles Recknagel and Merkhat Sharipzhan have more:
Punitive Medicine? Crimean Tatars Shaken By Leader's Confinement To Mental Asylum
When a court in Russian-annexed Crimea ordered activist Ilmi Umerov to a psychiatric clinic for a month of assessment tests, the decision sent shock waves through the peninsula's indigenous ethnic Tatar minority.
For two and a half decades, authorities in Crimea have refrained from the routine Soviet-era practice of declaring dissidents mentally ill, condemning them to life in an insane asylum. But now, Umerov's sentencing and subsequent confinement to a psychiatric clinic in Simferopol suggests a return to the practice.
Crimean prosecutors first charged Umerov, the former deputy chairman of the Crimean Tatars' self-governing body -- the Mejlis -- with separatism in May after he made public statements opposing Moscow's seizure of the peninsula from Ukraine. Then, on August 11, while he was under home detention during his trial, a court ordered Umerov to undergo psychiatric testing. A week later, he was forcibly committed to Simferopol's Psychiatric Hospital No. 1 for a 28-day period.
The forced admission to the clinic stunned Umerov's colleagues and supporters, who say the 59-year-old community leader is anything but mentally unbalanced.
"I have known him for 30 years, I know him well," Abdureshit Dzhepparov, coordinator of the Crimean Contact Group on Human Rights, told RFE/RL on August 22. "I may not be an expert psychiatrist, but on the eve of his removal to the psychiatric clinic, I know that he was without a doubt in full mental health."
Umerov's sudden dispatch to a mental institution, where for the first several days he was denied visitors or the use of a telephone, reminded many of the dark days when dissidents in the Soviet Union simply disappeared into asylums, never to be seen or heard from again.
"This is the first case in [post-Soviet] Crimea where they have placed a normal person in a psychiatric hospital," said Dzhepparov. "If you do not fight against it now, and try to change it, there could be second, third, and fourth cases...until it becomes a conveyor belt."
Read the entire article here